Divers Off Pearl Harbor to Explore USS Arizona Wreck

June 21, 2001 - 0:0
PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii Raising the hull of the sunken USS Arizona without spilling the more than one million gallons of oil trapped inside is the task a team of divers and metal specialists have been saddled with, AFP reported on Wednesday.

In a preliminary study, the team will go below the ocean surface to examine the wreckage lost to a Japanese bomb in the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Arizona and her 1,177 men sunk in nine minutes and lit the skies for three days as the oil inside her burned. A trickle of oil has leaked into the ocean ever since.

But after nearly 60 years, the ship -- now a hugely-popular war memorial -- could corrode and spring a massive leak.

Donald Johnson, professor of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Engineering, started the study on June 20. "It's been there a long time. Eventually all things corrode away," he said.

An oily sheen lies on the water surrounding the ship, which jettisoned the top half of her superstructure in the 1960s to make an attractive memorial for the more than one million visitors who travel here each year.

Salvage operations technology to raise her did not exist at the time, so the U.S. Navy concentrated on 20 other salvageable battleships that could be readied for war.

With improved technology, scientists and engineers hope to collect metal samples to find clues about the hull's rate of decay and then plot their next step.

"You know over time this thing is going to deteriorate and disintegrate. But when?" said Dan Boyer, a spokesman for the memorial run by the National Park Service.

The Navy has practiced a series of maneuvers to contain a potential oil spill in Pearl Harbor, and has an emergency system in place in case of an environmental disaster which could wreak havoc on the delicate marine ecosystem surrounding the big island of Hawaii.

To guard against oil entering the open ocean around nearby wetlands that are home to endangered bird species, the Navy's contingency plan would include laying booms at the mouth of Pearl Harbor.